How the Catholic Church masterminded the Supreme Court’s Hobby Lobby debacle
While evangelical Christians ultimately brought down the contraception mandate, they had big help from Catholics
Timothy Dolan, Antonin Scalia (Credit: AP/Seth Wenig/Dave Tulis)
Sunday, Sep 14, 2014 06:59 AM EDT
Patricia Miller
Adapted from "Good Catholics: The Battle Over Abortion in the Catholic Church"
From a father in Missouri whos looking to keep his daughters from accessing birth control, to the refusal of key contraception mandate plaintiffs to accept the Obama administrations latest accommodation, the Hobby Lobby decision continues to reverberate.
But while the Green family who filed the Hobby Lobby suit objecting to the mandate are evangelical Christians, the road to Hobby Lobby wasnt paved by the Christian Right. It was the Catholic Church, more specifically the U.S. Catholic bishops conference, that largely engineered Hobby Lobby to block the legitimization of contraception as a standard health insurance benefita last ditch effort to prevent by law what it couldnt prevent from the pulpit: women from using birth control.
The Catholic bishops interest in conscience clauses that would allow employers to opt out of reproductive health care services began in earnest in the late 1990s, with the increased viability at the state and national levels of contraceptive equity measures designed to ensure that health plans covered prescription contraceptives like the Pill just like other prescription medications. For years, insurers had omitted contraceptives from prescription drug plansthe only entire class of drugs routinely and explicitly excludedwhich made womens out-of-pocket medical expenses some 70 percent higher than mens. Measures to ensure contraceptive equity had been stalled by male legislators and social conservatives who asserted that employers and insurers shouldnt be forced to pay for what they called a lifestyle choice, not a health care need. Despite that fact that nearly all women use contraceptives at some point in their lives98 percent, according to government surveysand that at any given moment two-thirds of women of child-bearing age are using a contraceptive method, the implication was that fertility management was frivolous or immoral and that other people shouldnt be forced to pay for it.
When Connecticut considered a contraceptive equity measure in 1999, a Catholic priest, the Rev. Joseph Looney of Bethlehem, Connecticut, told the legislature that covering contraceptives would only benefit playboys and would fund craziness and irresponsibility. It was a framework that conservatives had successfully applied to abortionasserting that it must be segregated from other health services and government funding because it was immoraland now were trying to apply to birth control.
http://www.salon.com/2014/09/14/how_the_catholic_church_masterminded_the_supreme_courts_hobby_lobby_debacle/